ABSTRACT
The original plan for this book was that it be a study of different kinds of language policies, to be exemplified by a selection of typical kinds of policies exhibited by a small number of nation states (and other polities) in the modern and pre-modern world. I had originally intended to contrast the policies of the USA, France and India, since those are familiar to me from personal research, and because they are in some ways very typical. French language policy represents centrist policy par excellence, that is, a unilingual policy decreed from above, handed down and strictly controlled by a highly centralized state (multilingual, but refusing to recognize it). US language policy was to exemplify laissez-faire policy as applied to a supposedly monolingual state that is actually multilingual; Indian language policy was to represent an admittedly multilingual nation to which the Soviet policy model has been transplanted, but with unhappy results.
